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Communication is an indispensable part of international cooperation and it requires managing different cultures. Being prepared to see and understand different values, trying to understand contrasting views in a consortium, can decrease the potential of misperception which otherwise may act as a real barrier to cooperation. This is why international cooperation necessitates negotiation across cultures. In the case of collaboration, parties come together for a joint work which itself may create common values/understanding, besides the set goals. This is because collaboration requires strong we-feeling and commitment. The purpose of this paper is to focus on cross-cultural communication and collaboration in the area of Open and Distance Learning (ODL), concentrating on the communication processes in project management. Cross-cultural studies point to different communicative behaviours of individuals in multinational work environments e.g. the cultural characteristics affect the preferences towards the use of the media. For the purposes of this paper, the authors make a phenomenological-oriented case study of project management based on interviews with partners of a multilateral Grundtvig (adult learning) project, affiliated with distance education institutions in eight different countries. The authors test their assumptions for constructive and cooperative communication in e-Learning projects; delineating the effects of different cultures as regards the expectations from (1) international projects and (2) communication media.

Open online courses (OOC) with a massive number of students have represented an important development for online education in the past years. A course on artificial intelligence, CS221, at the University of Stanford was offered in the fall of 2011 free and online which attracted 160,000 registered students. It was one of three offered as an experiment by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills to the entire world. The instructors were two of the best known experts in the subject of artificial intelligence. Although students would not get Stanford University grades or credit, 20,000 from 190 countries finished the course successfully receiving a "statement of accomplishment" from the tutors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Udacity is a start-up from the authors of CS221 delivering similar massive free online courses. EdX, a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world, is one of the most recent proposals in this realm. Massive open online courses known as connectivist MOOCs (c MOOCs) on the other hand have been delivered since 2008. They are based on the explicit principles of connectivism (autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity) and on the activities of aggregation, remixing, repurposing and feeding forward the resources and learning. In the research literature, newspaper and magazine articles both types of OOCs, AI Stanford like courses (AI) and c-MOOCs, have been identified in many occasions as equivalent. Distance education (DE) pedagogy can be classified through the evolution of three categories: cognitive-behaviourist, social constructivist, and connectivist. These three current and future generations of DE pedagogy have an important place in a well-rounded educational experience. To a large extent, the generations have evolved in tandem with the technologies and all three models are very much in existence today and are categorized by a set of conditions. In this paper we study in detail representative courses from AI and c MOOC formats. We establish that although they share the use of distributed networks the format associated with c-MOOCs, which are defined by a participative pedagogical model, are unique and different from AI. We further assign to the AI to a cognitive-behaviourist (with some small contribution of social constructivist) and MOOCs to connectivist pedagogy. (Contains 2 tables and 4 figures.)